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Alternative voices, breaks

Alt Break participants provide first-person accounts of playing soccer with at-risk youth and talking to a senior citizen about meeting Ernest Hemingway

Grinnell: 'We [Heart] the Elderly'

By Allison Rosenthal

Our Alternative Break trip exemplified the word "alternative." Instead of traveling to an exotic locale with either a metropolis or warm weather, we stayed in Grinnell and served an often overlooked sector of the population?the elderly.

Though our trip activities included everything from volunteering at Second Mile to playing bingo, our two major objectives were to help plan the Mayflower Home's winter carnival and to compile a book of oral histories from both the seniors at the Mayflower Home and in the Grinnell community. Transcribing the oral histories consumed more of our time, but was also our greatest success.

Our biggest obstacle was fitting in enough time for interviews due to such a high level of interest. The seniors shared their stories about their families, working on farms, World War II and living in Grinnell. One senior talked about celebrating Christmas with Ernest Hemingway while stationed in Key West, Fla. during World War II.

Some revealed the way of life in rural Iowa; one resident of the Mayflower Home worked as a teacher in a one-room school house in New Sharon, Iowa, and talked about how she needed to keep her elopement a secret to avoid being fired for being a married woman.

All of the participants' histories gave us a sense of the culture and lifestyle of Iowa.

This Alternative Break trip also enabled me to leave the Grinnell College bubble and interact with and really become a part of the Grinnell community. We attended the Democratic gubernatorial caucus that was held on Martin Luther King Day.

The town welcomed our political participation and offered us the opportunity to be part of the county committees to plan the Iowa Democratic Party?s platform and to attend the convention.

Omaha: 'Youth and the Justice System'

By Liz Carrier

I learned from Alt Break--this may sound cheesy--how much fun I could have while volunteering. I've volunteered before for places like Habit for Humanity and Planned Parenthood, and those were all fulfilling experiences because I felt like I was helping a cause I really believed in.

This time, besides feeling like I was doing something positive, I actually had a lot of fun. I spent a lot of my week playing soccer, basketball and football with very enthusiastic kids. What's not to love? I could spend all day attempting to beat 15-year-old boys in a one-on-one game of basketball.

When I first applied to Alt Break, this trip was advertised to me as "The Justice System ? A Generational Approach" or something like that. We were going to do some work in prisons, but also with people who were at risk for ending up in the penal system.

I was prepared for a pretty heavy volunteer experience. But, because of red tape within the Nebraska penal system and other problems, we didn't actually end up doing any volunteering in the prison system.

The majority of our volunteering time was spent working with at-risk kids at the four different Boys and Girls Clubs around Omaha.

We also helped out one day with an after-school academic enrichment program called Pacesetter Academy, took a tour of a jail in Omaha, went to meetings for a group called Stand Up for Children and went to Civil and Criminal Court to learn about Protection From Abuse orders and how the court proceedings for those work.

But most of our time we just played with the kids. I liked that we got to go to all four clubs in the Omaha area, as each one had a completely different feel to it, such as how crowded the club was-or wasn't-what sports the kids wanted to play, how much freedom the kids had and each neighborhood itself.

Sidebar: Alt break

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